The Psychoanalytic Approach to Personality

The Structure of Personality in Psychoanalytic Theory

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Much of what causes our personality takes place in our
Unconscious: thoughts, feelings, wishes, and drives that operate below our level of conscious awareness. We don't consciously know they exist.

What’s in the unconscious mind can be revealed in several ways:

Dreams
Slips of the tongue

At birth, our personality consists of the Id.
Id: the completely unconscious part of the mind, without morals or logic, driven by two instincts:

Eros, the life instinct: the instinct to gratify biological urges including food thirst, physical comfort, and sexual pleasure.

Libido: sexual motivation, part of Eros

Thanatos, the death instinct: the instinct to destroy others and oneself

The id is made of the battling forces of Eros and Thanatos.

The id is ruled by the
Pleasure Principle: the drive to immediately increase pleasure, reduce tension, and avoid pain.
The id tries to satisfy its needs through:
Primary process thinking: forming a mental image of the object the id desires and satisfying the desire through the mental image.

Want food: imagine a cake.
Want drink: imagine a soda.
Want a certain person: imagine them, or have a dream about them.

Ego: the partly conscious part of the mind that organizes behavior, is logical, and makes plans to satisfy the Id in safe, realistic ways. The ego develops in the first few years of life.

Reality Principle: the attempt by the ego to find safe, realistic ways of meeting the needs of the id.

The ego is that part of the personality that adapts the person to the real world:

It makes plans to take care of the Id’s needs.
Modifies the Id’s needs to make them possible to satisfy
Represses or hides the Id’s needs if they are impossible to satisfy

Over time, society’s demands become accepted as an “internal voice” in the child. This is the superego.

Superego: the moralistic component of personality, that judges one’s actions, thoughts, and feelings according to society’s rules and attempts to reach perfection.
True punishment comes from the superego:

Guilt
Anxiety
Shame
Inferiority

The superego also provides rewards for attempting to be perfect:

Pride

By adolescence everyone has a personality structure consisting of:

An Id, with instinctive drives for sex and destruction
A Superego, which is very judgmental and makes us feel guilty because of our secret desires
An Ego, which tries to be practical and satisfy the needs of the Id without causing guilt or shame or anxiety from the Superego.

The Ego tries to take care of the Id's needs without causing guilt from the Superego.
Sometimes this is possible. Sometimes it's impossible.